Rails Web Host Engine Yard Now $3.5 Million Richer!

Prominent Rails Web hosting company Engine Yard have raised $3.5 million from Benchmark Capital, a particularly successful venture capital firm who backed AOL and eBay in the early days. Money is afloweth into the Ruby and Rails sector!

The best write up of this news is by Obie Fernandez over at InfoQ. He talks about Engine Yard's operation, their hiring of Rubinius developers, and Engine Yard's thoughts for the future. Interestingly:

In discussing the benefits of taking VC money at this time, Engine Yard CEO Lance emphasized the fact that unlike hosting, Rubinius development is a longer-term play, which along with Merb may eventually become part of a commercially-available technology stack.

Judging from what he/she said in the mod_ruby thread, I think Gen Du is just playing devil's advocate (not that that's a bad thing). I guess he/she is making the point that if money is being thrown after a company potentially pursuing a commercial Rubinius/Merb stack, that could eat into JRuby adoption.. but then the same is true of work on any alternative implementations.

Gen Du says:January 12, 2008 at 5:14 am

It's the JBoss model. Gee... what other companies has Benchmark won big with?

There's no JRuby "market" as you well know. If Sun is pursuing a JRuby consulting market they're doing it all wrong. EY on the other hand is making a very calculated move to tie the future of Ruby to their products so they can rent you their $400 p/h Ruby architects (not kidding).

Hey, well, it's better than the old Enterprise. But I'm not convinced the best interests of Ruby are their first priority.